Using Real User Metrics to Measure Performance

Using real user metrics is a far more accurate way to monitor how the performance of your site is affecting real users, but how do we get these metrics effectively? One of the issues with when you monitor site performance, is to determine how some current methods aim to measure real user metrics is the need to navigate from page to page to get a site metric. This means users going straight to the home page or navigating to the site from a different location will not be accounted for. And it is often these measurements that are the most effective. Moreover, these statistics cannot be broken down into the fine grain details.

We will look at the Navigation Timing API, a feature built into many modern browsers which allows us to collect highly accurate, granular, data which we can then store for analysis. We will provide a demo of a web application we have built which will hopefully appear across many of Sky’s web properties such as Sky.com in the future. Our web application takes data from our Mongo database then produces various tabular and graphical representations to help make all this data useful. We will also show how our system can be used to support alerting and discuss how our system could be expanded in the future.